Dorottya Balkó's articles
Questions about showcasing vernacular photography vol. 1
Roundtable summary
Although amateur or family photographs weren’t created with the intention of being institutionally collected, researched, and displayed, these visual materials have still become an important topic in contemporary visual culture. The collecting of everyday photographs has a rich history in Hungary; hence they can be found in archives of vastly different profiles. Eidolon Centre of Everyday Photography now takes up the quest to initiate discussion concerning the different institutional approaches to vernacular photography and to uncover the legal issues their usage and showcasing might bring forward.
Questions about showcasing vernacular photography vol. 2 – Focusing on copyright
Roundtable summary
When someone takes up the challenge of showcasing photographs on a website or as part of a print publication, more often than not faces the limitations of copyright. Therefore, the second panel discussion of Eidolon Centre for Everyday Photography hosted by Capa Center focused on the detailed explanation of the current copyright system using Fortepan as a case study. The guests were Dr. Flóra Gubicz copyright lawyer and Miklós Tamási, the founder of Fortepan.
Questions about showcasing vernacular photography vol. 3 – Focusing on personality rights
Roundtable summary
Not only copyright, but also personality rights could pose a serious challenge for institutions showcasing everyday photographs. Since these photos were taken of and by private individuals, their publishing can understandably cause personal inconveniences. Through the discussion of lawyer Bea Bodrogi and the director of Eidolon Centre Róza Tekla Szilágyi, the third event organized by Eidolon Centre and Capa Centre dived into the complexities of personality rights.
Unboxing the Horus Archives
Event summary
Curious gazes were roaming over the unassuming shoeboxes placed in the middle of the table. The small studio space of Capa Center slowly filled up with excitement as people were waiting for their lids to open and the stories locked inside them to unfold.
On the liquid time of photography
Summary of the In Visible Presence book launch
With the passing decades, the changes in memory politics require us to constantly reflect back on and contextualise certain parts of our national history. The photograph functioning as a kind of lieu de mémoire can help us either recall bygone events or create a subsequent connection to our ancestors’ past. Showcased on bookshelves, organised in numbered albums or kept in shoeboxes, everyday photographs are especially powerful tools to engage with stories that are often missing from history books – the private narratives of ordinary people.
Eidolon Club vol. 1 – ‘And the King Said, What a Fantastic Machine’ screening and discussion
Event summary
Historical footages of the first photographic experiments and familiar-looking, viral clips flashing before our eyes, telling the story of how the invention and technological development of the camera fundamentally influenced human behaviour. The documentary titled And the 'King Said: What a Fantastic Machine' tackles the problems rooted in our often-lacking understanding of how images work. The work of directors Axel Danielson and Maximilien Van Aertryck was the topic of the first Eidolon Club event, discussed by professionals working in the field of visual culture.
“What is striking about private photographs is that they are ambivalent.”
– Interview with experimental filmmaker Péter Lichter
The powerful, uncanny visuality of damaged, half-decayed frames building up Péter Lichter’s films might be familiar to many of us. As a director of captivating found footage films, Lichter has become an acknowledged character of the Hungarian and international experimental film scene.
Uncertainty bound in books – Interview with Melissa Catanese
Obscure figures emerging from distant or recent pasts, appearing within or next to ambiguous places. Flipping through the pages of visual artist Melissa Catanese’s photo-books, we experience the visceral uncertainty that defines our present world. The anonymous vernacular photographs, mixed at times with the artist’s own pictures, present dreamlike narratives, providing an in-depth insight into our nature, psyche, and our connection to the past and the future.
“The images I create become a puzzle to solve – which defies the presumed purpose of photography”
An interview with Daniel Rapley
The recently published photobook titled 'Drift', by Nottinghamshire-based artist Daniel Rapley, is about the materiality of the photographic image. Drawing from a background in painting, Rapley experiments with the abstract qualities of photographic slide transparencies sourced from eBay and house clearances. His images, saturated with vivid bursts of bright yellow, red, deep blue, and green, oscillate between the dream-like and the unsettling. A subtle tension unfolds in the clash of emotions as we move through the pages of the book – the shifting scales and hues, the wavering certainty of what we are meant to see. In Drift, the narrative role of the photographic image recedes as we are confronted with photography’s inherent uncanniness.
Staring down the dark barrel of the future – On Hito Steyerl’s exhibition at the MAK
The title of the exhibition evokes an ominously vivid mental image, originally penned by the Austrian essayist and journalist Karl Kraus. A vocal critic of the cultural and public affairs of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, Kraus dedicated himself to publishing satirical accounts exposing the lies and deceptions propagated by the official press at the beginning of the twentieth century. Many of his publications and books address the moral, societal, and political doom of humanity, brought about by World War I and the rising power of autocratic regimes, further enabled by rapid technological developments. By choosing this line from Kraus, the exhibition signals a conceptual continuity with his satirical and critical stance, while also disassembling the mechanics of the impending doom he envisioned.
Navigating ambiguity On the exhibition of Bruno Decharme’s photo/brut collection at the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center
How can an exhibition negotiate the mystique of artistic genius that inevitably takes shape within both market and art historical logics, and the strong relation of photo-based artworks to our collective, shared reality? How can it navigate the aspects of individual narratives and the collective dilemmas embedded within them? The ambiguity that defines French filmmaker and producer Bruno Decharme’s collection of photo-based art brut works also permeates its exhibition at the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center, titled PHOTO/BRUT – Instinctive Photography – Insights into the Bruno Decharme Collection from Paris. By examining the narration of the exhibition, and the structure of the collection, along with its relation to everyday imaging, the text considers the nature of this ambiguity and its subversive potential the concept may or may not have taken into consideration.
